Books Archives

Little Green is Walter Mosley’s 12th Easy Rawlins book, and reading it is a bit like watching Scandal – it’s breathless, a little far-fetched, full of strange and unexpected sex, and totally enthralling despite all that. Or maybe because of it.

Once upon a time, Tyrese Gibson was a master MAN-ipulator who would sneak around behind his girlfriends’ backs in order to whet his ravenous appetite for T&A. If his girlfriends started to suspect anything, he’d turn into a MAN-gician, pulling out all the stops to dazzle himself back into their good graces and convince them Read More

Cross-posted from The Feminist Texican [Reads]. Houston, we have a problem. Caitlin Moran‘s How to Be a Woman, which was released across the pond last year with much success, was released in the United States this summer. It’s been marketed as a memoirish feminist manifesto, with Moran being billed as a British version of Tina Read More

Okay, so I am not one who can churn out literary reviews well, partially, because I don’t like reading literary reviews. They’re too long. I would much prefer something succinct like: “this book is tight, bam-bam-bam- these are the reasons why… but I am not going to spoil it for you so, the end.” So Read More

When people think of slave revolts in United States history, the Nat Turner rebellion is usually what comes to mind. On August 21, 1831, Turner led a group of slaves in a rebellion that resulted in the deaths of almost 60 white men, women, and children. While I don’t remember ever going into much depth Read More

Some Sing, Some Cry is a sweeping family saga that spans seven generations of the Mayfield family. It begins with Ma Bette, the Mayfield matriarch, and her granddaughter Eudora as they leave Sweet Tamarind, the planation where they’ve spent their entire lives, and head to Charleston to begin their lives anew. In the generations that Read More

I first stumbled across Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, when its author, Danielle Evans, a 26-year-old professor of creative writing and literature at American University, wrote two blog posts about MFA programs that were tweeted by a friend of mine, and I found myself saying “yes!” multiple times out loud when I read Read More

There’s a game I like to play when I walk into a bookstore. Based on the the title, cover and store placement I can always interpret the marketing intention for a book meant for a black American audience. The best part of this game is that the books will, typically, fit into the following categories Read More

We’re having a good discussion in the comments on my earlier post, but a few people took issue with my suggestion that books are expensive, which makes them less accessible for disadvantaged folks. I’d like to add to that something else that occurred to me: the rewards of books are less immediate. So even though Read More

Crossposted from Attackerman. Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, a newly completed, decades-long study shows that children who grew up in a home with 500 or more books stay in school three years longer than kids whose parents only had a few books, and that children whose parents have lots of books are Read More